


Day Will Come Again

by Erradianwhocantread



Series: And Death Shall Have No Dominion [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Mentions of Maedhros/Fingon - Freeform, Psychological Torture, Rule 63, Torture, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 10:53:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12011211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erradianwhocantread/pseuds/Erradianwhocantread
Summary: Part I of an AU where Fingon gets captured instead of killed at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. Fingon's experiences in Angband.





	Day Will Come Again

**Author's Note:**

> 1) shoutout to fidelishaereticus for help in creating this AU and this story.
> 
> 2) Rule 63 Fingon, Maedhros, and pretty much everyone else. If you don't like gender swaps of characters, I am sorry and you should go read a story that you will like instead.
> 
> 3) The descriptions of the torture aren't particularly graphic, but I would say they are still pretty intense. There's a lot of mind-invasion, the results of physical torture are described, and there's sensory deprivation/solitary confinement. If you find any of these potentially very upsetting, you should probably go read a story you will like instead.

At least, Fingon thought, they had not captured Turgon. At least the two Gondolindrim whom they had taken had flung themselves on the spears of the enemy before they could be interrogated. At least her last remaining sibling was safe. For now. At least they could get nothing out of her that would compromise the location of the Hidden City, for she was ignorant. She had hoped that her captors would put her to death in a rage at the disappointingly little information in her head. It was a cowardly hope, and it was not answered. Fingon had thought, foolishly, that knowing what to expect, having walked in Maedhros’ memories of what had been done to her, she could resist better, or it would be easier. Foolish. So foolish. But at least the Enemy’s Lieutenant had not found her half so amusing as it had Maedhros. How had she let this happen? Fingolfin had not allowed herself to be taken. Feanor had not allowed it. Finwe had not allowed it. High King for not even two decades, and she had led her people to ruin, to slavery, and to despair. And she had been captured. She remembered her flesh being seared through her armor by the flaming whip that had been wrapped round her, pinning her arms. She had looked Gothmog in the face as he raised his blade, defiant… the next thing she remembered was cold. Terrible cold, and pain, and stench, and darkness, and dread. She was naked in the dark, chained, mocked… and now, now that they had cracked her head open and found there nothing useful or amusing, she was to be used to break the spirits of her own people.

But in that, they had overreached themselves. 

High King Fingon had been thrown into the mines, to labor there, a hideous iron contraption that bit into her shorn head with cruel spikes no matter how she turned locked onto her for a crown. If one of her fellow thralls did not move fast enough, did not show the proper servility, was perceived to be proud or defiant, or hesitated at all in performing the most horrifying commands, she bore their punishment. And so the execrable creature that Maedhros had named Sauron thought to break both her and all those of her people who saw her.

It might have worked. Fingon’s spirit was strong, but not unbreakable. Especially not after what she had brought her people to. Especially not now that her love had so failed her again, at such cost, again. Especially now that, even with Turgon still at liberty and Gondolin still hidden, she could not see a way forward. All it would have taken to win her to her own harm would have been for the Prince of Lies to tell her what she already knew to be the truth. 

But instead she had been cast in with the other captives, those of Dor Lomin, the small handful from Ard Galen who had not burned, those of Hithlum and Nargothrond and Himlad and Nevrast. And no matter how she, Findekano Astaldo, might be tempted by despair, High King Fingon must not fail them. She had led her people to ruin. She would not lead them to corruption. And so she encouraged their defiance. She reveled in the beatings and the brandings and the flayings. She wore each mark they gave her as they were the highest of honors, for so they were: every bruise, every scar, every broken tooth was a testament to her people’s defiance, to their survival, to their refusal to bow the head, bend the knee, submit. 

Day will come again.

They said that to each other now, when they noticed a comrade was tempted, tempted to report one of their fellows to curry favor, tempted to steal food from another, tempted to concede the lordship of the Morgoth, tempted to utter the fatal words “please, no more, I’ll do whatever you want.” Day will come again. Fingon never let on that she herself no longer believed it, could not envision it. She never told them that their steadfastness, their stubborn impossible hope, was the only thing which stood between her and the black pit of her own faithlessness. These were her people. She had led them into a killing darkness, like Fingolfin before her. Like Fingolfin before her, she would lead them through it.

Day will come again.

True resistance, she learned quickly, was not possible. Rebellion, real rebellion, was not possible. An example had been made for the mass of new thralls shortly after the triumph of the Enemy in the fifth great battle. Sauron had set a contingent of thralls to plotting, encouraged them through devious means to murder their overseers and escape. They hadn’t suspected a thing. Everyone had been made to watch their punishment. Fingon had vomited bile and air for hours afterwards. She had not slept for weeks. Years she had now been here, and she could not close her eyes without seeing their faces. They were in no position to fight back. But she would see that they endured. 

Day will come again. Day must come again. 

They were made the instruments of the destruction of their free kin. Morgoth knew well the skill of the Noldor, and he put it to evil use. Fingon did not bid her people refuse the task. Perhaps she should have. She had considered it. Fingolfin would have (though Fingolfin would never have suffered herself to be taken alive). But the screams of the would-be escapees had echoed in her ears and she could not counsel her people on to such an end. They could not refuse. But they could sabotage. They would never know, of course, if it made a difference, that the blades they forged for the Orcs contained hidden enchantments so that they would fail at the least opportune moment, that the bows they made could only be aimed aright by innocent hands, that the armor would yield should it be met with Elven steel, that the gears on the war engines would snag or the fastenings on the saddles break. Perhaps it would not. But it was something. They would not be used thus. Any Ainur would have seen what they were about immediately if any Ainur had bothered to look. But Sauron had become so confident in their meekness after the display that overseers were chosen from among their own ranks. Only one ever dared report anything amiss. Fingon had learned after she’d regained consciousness and perfunctory use of her limbs that the workers had made their own example of him. Once, maybe, Fingon would have thought that excessive, would have pitied him, would have drawn compassion and forbearance from the thousands of reasons he had done it. Once, but no longer. And so their sabotages, the daily infinitesimal rebellions of the Noldor, continued.

The assault on the Falas, Fingon was sure, was her doing. Morgoth had found the existence of one who carried the blood of both Feanor, his obsession, and Fingolfin, who had wounded him, intolerable. Gil-Galad’s location, along with much about her, had been torn mercilessly from Fingon’s mind. Years later and she still counted that as the worst torment she had been dealt. Struggling, she knew from Maedhros, only made such extractions worse, only enraged the interrogator. Yet she had thrown everything she had against Morgoth, and when it became horribly clear that he would ransack her mind and that there was nothing she could do to stop it, she had thrown her memories at him as bait, as a bulwark. Memories of Feanor, of Fingolfin, of Turgon, of Nargothrond, of Maedhros, memories of Gil-Galad that would not aid any foul purpose against her, all lay now in singed tatters where Morgoth had cut through them. Most of her memories of Gil-Galad had been entirely obliterated, Void usurping their place. She had sent her star-child to the Havens for her safety, had refused outright to allow her a place in her hosts. All she had accomplished by that was to make Cirdan the most tempting target for the Enemy’s wrath. Fingon had been made to work in crafting the dreadful engines, and then in deploying them (Sauron’s idea) against the Havens. Somehow no one had noticed the craft she and her people had employed in the construction. Engines failed. Their operators never knew if it was their cunning, the valor of Cirdan’s people, or Ulmo’s protection that had confounded Morgoth’s design, but it did not matter. The people of the Havens, and Gil-Galad, had survived.

There had been a time, shortly after she had been placed in the mines, when Fingon had hoped against hope and experience that Maedhros would come for her, as she had come for Maedhros when their positions had been reversed. It had not lasted long. She had known that Maedhros would return for her and the rest of their people after the Darkening, as she had promised, known it until she had seen the glow of the ships burning from across the waves. She had known again, during the battle, that Maedhros would come, as she had promised. She had known it as she knew that a stone dropped from the hand would fall to the ground. And yet Maedhros came not. Nor would she come. She lived, Fingon could still feel that much, and for that she was glad. But twice she had pinned all her hopes on her beloved and twice her beloved had proved faithless. And though a fool Fingon may be, she was not so much a fool as to make the same mistake thrice. Besides, there was no room in her thoughts here for Maedhros (how she had survived, where she had found shelter, how she lived, did she think of Fingon here at all, did she think her dead?) as High King Fingon was fully occupied by the matter of her people’s survival. As Prince Findekano had been upon the Ice. Maedhros would not come, and had Sauron been wiser and less glutted on victory, that in and of itself could have broken Fingon’s spirit. But though Maedhros would not come for her, it mattered little. Day would come again, regardless. Three short years of the sun into her imprisonment and Fingon found she rarely thought of her. 

But she did think of Hurin. Not a day went by that she did not think of Hurin, that she did not cast an increasingly bitter prayer at Manwe’s feet to relieve him of his torment. It would have been simple enough to send a winged emissary to pluck out his eyes or pluck out his throat, simpler than what had been done for her, or what had been done for Hurin and his brother in their youth. No mercy ever came. Yet however Manwe Sulimo might be able to harden his heart or forget the plight of those in this Middle Earth, the High King of the Noldor could not. Not a day passed that Fingon did not grieve, did not rage, for Hurin. Day will come again, he had said, as darkness devoured all their hopes, and so it would, but he would not see it.

Maedhros had lasted thirty years of the sun, or so they had accounted it. Fingon was not sure she would last ten. Ironic, that it would likely be elegant and graceful Maitimo who proved the tougher. The captors would intervene to prevent Fingon from dying from the immediate effects of an administered punishment, and they would not kill her during one. But her body was failing her by degrees. Already her back was becoming bent. She was missing a toe that had been too badly shattered to heal. Her breath rattled and smarted as she did not believe her ribs had been allowed to fully heal once before they were broken again since she had been cast in among the other workers. She would run out of teeth soon, and she suspected her jaw must have been broken at at least one point, and healed badly. Her nose, somehow still on her face, bore no resemblance at all to what it had been. There were patches of flesh diminished and withered by burning that would not grow back. Her ears were mangled like some stray cat. A particularly severe punishment had shattered her right cheekbone and she had not been able to open her eye on that side for days. Months later and the black spots and distortions had not cleared from her vision. If she lived to taste freedom, she would never again be master of the bow, as she once had been. And then there was the small depression in the back of her head that she’d so far managed, mercifully, somehow, to keep secret, where the tormenting crown had struck the ground violently. She had to be very careful with how the foul rusted thing sat on her head. The wrong sort of pressure on that spot and, she had been told, for she never seemed able to remember it, she would convulse and swoon.

Yet it was good. Her people suffered the less for it. It was good. She could bear their suffering, and they, in return, bore up her failing spirit. She relished every physical reminder of their endurance. The Eldar had looked to the stars for hope, for comfort. Even if their Enemy destroyed and darkened and corrupted all the world, he could not touch their stars. Fingon now knew they had been fools to look heavenward. She knew not whether or not Varda’s work was truly unassailable, only that it was unassailed. But her people had been assailed, and beaten, and conquered. And her own body bore witness in a thousand ways that none of it would serve to put out the light which had been placed within them.

It had become, Fingon had learned, very rare indeed after Finrod’s death for any Elf to submit themselves to the Enemy. Felagund and the ten had, with their deaths, become a bulwark against corruptions. They had not broken, not when the wolves tore the flesh from their bodies, not when they watched their friends devoured alive in the dark, one by one. They had endured til the bitterest end. Their kinsfolk owed it to them to be no less hardy. And in the slow years since Fingon had been cast in amongst them, not a one,  _ not one _ , had submitted. There had been those who had feared themselves too weak, who had not been able to say with any certainty that when they were next tortured the fatal words would not pass their lips. Fingon had seen to it that they need never learn. Would their blood be accounted equally with the blood she had spilt at Alqualonde? They were her people, and she had killed them. And yet, surely, better to die cleanly and find one’s way to the Halls than to be twisted to the point of unmaking. At least in death they would remain themselves. She did not count the number of times she was called upon to dispense such mercy. She did not wonder if one day she would have to ask someone for the same boon.

There were secret ways out of fortress, out of the Mountains of Shadow, to freedom. Or at least out of Angband, never to return. Those who took those ways were never seen again. Many took this to mean they had escaped in truth, and drew hope from it. For all anyone knew the paths could lead to death in the barren wastes of the mountains or the charred desert that had been Ard Galen, or straight into Sauron’s waiting hands. There was no way to know. A few loyal friends had tried to convince her to try her luck, but she had refused. Her people needed her here. A king who would escape only to leave the greater number of her people to suffer torments she had led them to was no king at all. Should the secret ways lead not to freedom but traps… it was rumored Sauron was seeking a means of corruption that could circumvent defiance of the spirit. Fingon did not wish to find out their truth. Her position made her particularly vulnerable among thralls to having her mind invaded, and so not only would she not take the passages out, but she would suffer none to speak of them in her presence. Her ignorance had saved Turgon when no resolve would have. If these paths were true, it would shield those who took them.

Twelve years of the sun. That was how long Fingon lasted in the mines and foundries of Morgoth. Twelve years before Sauron realized the mistake in placing her there. Twelve years, and then an Elf she had been trying to comfort, who she had not known and had assumed was a Sinda recently taken, had transformed before her. The enemy’s Lieutenant had been revealed in all their hateful glory. They had thrown what Fingon would have called a hissy fit had they been a child, and not one of the most powerful Maia at least in Middle Earth, and yet she could think of no more accurate phrase. Apparently Fingon had spoilt their game, had not played as she ought, and now Sauron no longer found this amusing. After making their displeasure abundantly clear, and making quite sure that Fingon understood that she had no one to blame for what came next but herself, the creature ordered her seized. As the orcs approached, Fingon had kept her people from rising to her defense and their own demise. Her last act as their king. As they had dragged her away she had shouted “Day will come again!”

“That may be,” Sauron had quipped, “but you shall not see it.”

Fingon had thought she was to be put to death, or used for some vile experiment in corruption. She wished she had been put to death. A cowardly wish and yet the Halls of Mandos should be bliss in comparison. They had thrown her in a hole in the rock, deep in the pits below Thangorodrim, not tall enough for her to stand or long enough for her to lie down, darkness and darkness, worse than the darkness that had taken the Trees, worse than the darkness of the Helcaraxe before the rising of the sun, horrible, crushing, unlight. The stone door had been sealed above her. Buried alive. So she had thought at first. Yet if they meant merely to let her rot in her own filth and waste slowly of starvation and dehydration, there would not have been a small hole in the floor, and food and water would not have found their way into her miserable hole at intervals. This was meant to break her, not kill her. There was no light and no sounds save those she made. The air was thin and foul, as was her sustenance. There was no way to keep time in the hole. At some point Fingon realized she didn’t know if she had been in it for hours, days, or years. Day would come again, but she would not see it. And yet day would come again, though she be lost forever in darkness beyond darkness, the day would come.


End file.
